Internet-based party authentication and data verification systems are known per se, particularly for use in the context of financial transactions, such as credit-card purchases or buy/sell contracts, whereby the parties to the transaction are able (in some cases) to verify the authenticity of one another, to provide verified data (e.g. price, credit-card information) to one another, and to provide security of the data transferred. Others working with Internet-based transactional systems have developed systems that allow for the use of standardized data forms and secure signatures. In most if not all such instances, the verified and secure data are limited to selected fields in a suitable transaction database, and are limited in many instances to either signatures (or electronic equivalent) or numerical data.
In other contexts, electronic messages between two or more communicating parties that are intended to lead to an agreement of some sort between them (or at least to an understanding that an agreement has not been reached) may be encrypted or otherwise secured in some suitable fashion by the parties, but remain susceptible to tampering by the parties themselves. For example, a party sophisticated in computer technology can generate for a stored message an apparent date and time that are not the true date and time on which the message was sent. Or such party can concoct a fictitious message that purports to have been sent to or received from the other party, and store the fictitious message with an attributed date and time that suit the wrongful purposes of the party who has concocted the message.
Further, conventional e-mail message exchanges lack a structure that compels the recipient to concur with the content of the message or to initiate a counterprocedure that could lead to modification or retraction of the content, or to a superseding text. There are e-mail communication systems that prioritize messages and that invite the recipient to acknowledge their receipt, etc., but there is a need for a system that is structured to compel or strongly induce the recipient of a message not only to provide a response but also to provide in such response an express agreement or lack of agreement with the content of a transmitted message.